The largest donor to the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) has paused funding to the body before its revised budget on 12 May, triggering concern among member states and NGOs.

The news could carry significance for the already troubled plastic treaty negotiations being overseen by Unep. Since 2022 countries have been struggling to agree on how to deal with the volume of plastics being produced and used, a subject widely acknowledged to be one of the most serious environmental issues of the age, but despite six rounds of talks there has been no agreement in sight.

Unep’s executive director, Inger Andersen, met the director general of the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) the week before last and was told that “all [funding] agreements are on hold” pending budget decisions, according to sources.

Norway has been the largest overall donor to Unep in recent years, contributing approximately $12m (£9m) annually to the fund over the three years to 2025. Norway also contributed $19m in 2025 to the Planetary Fund and another $7.8m in earmarked funds in 2025, meaning that even a pause introduces significant uncertainty for future functioning of the global environment agency with the wider UN already facing severe financial pressure.

In addition, the Guardian has obtained an email sent to NGOs by Norad advising them that it was postponing a funding call aimed at projects to combat plastic pollution in developing countries.

The programme is valued at £4m-£6m a year and, according to Norad, the funding can be used for projects that support countries in the plastic treaty process. Christina Dixon, ocean campaign leader at the Environmental Investigation Agency, said: “Any risk to funding could not come at a worse time for the negotiations … sustained funding would reinforce Norway’s longstanding leadership toward an ambitious plastics treaty.”

Norway is the co-leader with Rwanda of the high ambition coalition at the plastic treaty negotiations. The coalition says it is working for an “ambitious” and legally binding instrument on the “full life cycle of plastics”. This stands in contrast to a small group of petrostates, who are widely seen as blocking moves to put a cap on plastic production.

Last year, the chair of the process resigned suddenly, with the talks in disarray. This came just months after the previous round of talks collapsed with little progress and three years of negotiations. A new chair was elected this year, with negotiations expected to resume in early 2027.

Karen Landmark, managing director at GRID-Arendal, a Norwegian environmental foundation that works closely with Unep, said her organisation was concerned the funding pause could “give other countries an excuse to lower their level of ambition”.

“For years, Norway has played a clear and constructive leadership role in pushing for a strong global plastics treaty. When a country in that position signals hesitation or withdraws support, the consequences can extend far beyond its own borders,” she said.

Oil and gas is Norway’s largest sector with petroleum revenues amounting to £52m in 2025 alone, and last week the government was criticised for approving plans to reopen three of its North Sea gasfields to help fill the gap in energy supplies created by the Middle East war.

Frøya Skjold Sjursæther of the Green party said: “It’s a complete scandal if Norway moves to cut support for the global plastic clean-up effort. Norway has long worked for a global plastics treaty, and rightly so, given that Norwegian oil contributes to millions of tonnes of plastic every year.”

Norway’s reassessment of Unep funding comes amid a shifting domestic political and economic debate over climate and environmental spending. The country is governed by the centre-left Labour party, which has continued to position Norway internationally as a supporter of climate diplomacy, rainforest protection and efforts to negotiate a global plastics treaty. However, the Jonas Gahr Støre-led government, which was elected last year, is a minority administration and relies on agreements with other parties to pass budget measures.

When asked about the postponement of the plastics funding communicated to NGOs, Per Fredrik Pharo, head of Norad’s department for climate and nature, said there were several agreements for funding; that the main one was due to finish last year and had done so while another was “in an assessment process … where we need to determine the scale and scope of future cooperation”. That process will be finished mid 2026.

Another stream has been postponed but this work will be resumed “in the near future”. This adds to NGO confusion after a Norad minister recently noted in the Norwegian parliament that Norway would continue its funding to combat plastic pollution in developing countries, with an “ambition” to spend 1bn kroner (£79m) between 2025 and 2028.

Eirik Lindebjerg, conservation director of WWF Norway, issaid he was concerned by the “vague” language, adding: “If they are planning to continue with this, then why create so much uncertainty?”

Åsmund Aukrust, Norway’s minister of international development, said the Labour party governs in an “unpredictable economic situation” and that “every krone in the budget must be carefully considered”.

A Unep spokesperson said: “We have every faith that Norway will continue their strong environmental leadership.”

Alan Cumming has criticised the organisers of the Bafta film awards in February as “bad people who weren’t doing their jobs properly” after the N-word outburst by Tourette activist John Davidson, which was broadcast by the BBC during its coverage of the ceremony.

In an interview with the Sunday Times, Cumming, who was the host of the ceremony, said: “It was bad, bad, bad, bad leadership … Bad people who weren’t doing their jobs properly, who really had not prepared and let people down.”

Davidson, who attended the Baftas as I Swear, the film based on his life story, was nominated for a number of awards, shouted the N-word twice during the ceremony, as well as a slur aimed at Cumming. The BBC’s broadcast remained on BBC iPlayer overnight before the coverage was taken down. The BBC subsequently apologised, as did Bafta.

Describing the event as a “shitshow”, Cumming said he was not fully aware of what had transpired. “I had a thing in my ear and you can’t hear very specifically what’s happening. I haven’t actually asked them, but I don’t imagine that Delroy [Lindo] and Michael B Jordan heard the actual slur either.”

Cumming apologised during the ceremony, saying: “Tourette syndrome is a disability … we apologise if you are offended tonight.” He told the Sunday Times that neither he nor the audience had been warned by Bafta that Davidson might shout offensive slurs. “They just said, ‘There’ll be noise.’ You could say they didn’t know, but they clearly did, because apparently John had said the N-word at a party the day before.”

He added: “It was an international scandal. Then poor John gave this interview saying, ‘I’m not a racist. I called Alan Cumming a paedophile too.’  … Oh great! He’s equal opportunities and my name and ‘paedophile’ were in the same sentences all over the world.”

In an interview with Variety the week after the ceremony, Davidson said, “I can’t begin to explain how upset and distraught I have been as the impact from Sunday sinks in … I want people to know and understand that my tics have absolutely nothing to do with what I think, feel or believe. It’s an involuntary neurological misfire. My tics are not an intention, not a choice and not a reflection of my values.”

Cumming said he had no plans to host the Baftas again. “Right before it started, I said to my agent, ‘Remind me, I never want to do this again.’” He added: “It’s a tough gig. You’re trying to be funny for a bunch of people who are used to very generic, middle-of-the-road things, so you’re fighting against the quirky personality they want you to bring to it. That’s a battle.”

Bafta has been contacted for a response.

Catherine West, the Labour MP who announced a challenge to Keir Starmer’s leadership, has changed course and said she instead wants the prime minister to set a timetable of September for his departure.

West, the MP for Hornsey and Friern Barnet and a former Foreign Office minister, announced on Saturday that she would seek the gather the 81 Labour MPs’ names needed to formally challenge Starmer, while arguing that this was just a device to tempt others to stand, and that she did not wish to take over.

But in a statement released after Starmer’s speech on Monday morning in which he would fight on despite terrible results for Labour in elections last week, West called for an orderly process for Starmer to depart.

She said: “I have listened to the prime minister’s speech this morning. I welcome the renewed energy and ideas. However, I have reluctantly concluded that this morning’s speech was too little too late.

“The results last Thursday show that the prime minister has failed to inspire hope. What is best for the party and country now is for an orderly transition. I am hereby giving notice to No 10 that I am collecting names of Labour MPs to call on the prime minister to set a timetable for the election of a new leader in September.”

Under Labour rules, at least 81 MPs, or 20% of the total parliamentary party, need to back a challenge for one to happen. This means that West’s plan to gather names calling for a future contest would have no force under the rules, but would instead act as a de facto no confidence vote.

West’s change of plan potentially takes some of the urgency out of the situation, which has seen repeated speculation expected rivals like Wes Streeting, the health secretary, and Angela Rayner, Starmer’s former deputy, would launch imminent bids.

The prospect of a longer timetable would allow time for Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, to potentially return to parliament and join the contest although after his speech, Starmer said whether Burnham would be allowed to do this was still a matter for Labour’s national executive, which blocked him in January.

The illegal use of voter information by rightwing separatists in the province of Alberta has raised fresh fears over Canada’s electoral integrity by making valuable and “incredibly confidential” personal data easily accessible to malicious actors, security experts have warned.

The data breach, one of the largest in Canadian history, has prompted warnings of a “truly terrifying” new battleground over information, persuasion and foreign interference in already weakened democratic systems.

Activists in the oil-rich province have in recent months increased their effort to force an independence referendum. But debates over secession – already rife with accusations of treason and internecine feuding – have been overshadowed by revelations that a separatist-linked organization gained illegal access to Alberta’s official list of electors. The database contains the names, home addresses and contact information for roughly 2.9 million voters.

Elections Alberta, the body that administers the vote in the province, says it has launched an investigation into how how a far-right group was able to access the database and use it for a campaign to reach voters.

Separatist leaders recently unveiled an initiative using data-driven campaigning and grassroots mobilization to connect with voters.

During an online meeting with supporters, Centurion Project organizer Emmott Kelsey told attendees the app would “revolutionize” how campaigns are run. He boasted that the software underpinning it is “so groundbreaking” that it had been presented to Donald Trump’s White House.

“And we’re kind of the guinea pigs with it,” he said. The Guardian asked Kelsey to clarify his remarks but did not receive a response.

One of the key figures of the Centurion Project is David Parker, a veteran Alberta political organizer with deep ties to the separatist movement, and to US MAGA activists and far-right figures such as Tucker Carlson. Parker has previously faced hefty fines from Elections Alberta over violations of voting laws.

“Parker is a shockingly effective political organizer. What he was doing was attempting to create a digital grassroots organizational tool. And on its face, there’s nothing wrong with that,” said Jen Gerson, an Alberta-based journalist. “But in order to populate the app that underlies the Centurion Project, he needed data.”

In March, Gerson was tipped off that the Centurion Project had obtained a copy of the province’s voter list. Her source said they had been able to access the Centurion Project’s database without using their real name name or any traceable personal information.

Gerson said the absence of any security or protection was astounding.

“Anybody with a burner account and no credentials could then access the file and potentially download information from it,” she said. “If you knew about it, you could anonymously access the entire data root file.”

Gerson reported her concerns to Elections Alberta in late March. But the oversight body responded that while her report was “compelling”, Parker could have obtained the list legally from a data broker and concluded there were “no reasonable grounds” to investigate.

A month later, however, EA obtained a court order to shut the database down and launched an investigation. Canada’s federal police, the RCMP, and Alberta privacy commissioner are also investigating the breach.

In order to prevent the improper sharing of voter lists, EA “seeds” voter lists with fake names, and the body was able to confirm that the CP list had originally been provided legally to the Republican party of Alberta, a fringe rightwing party, and then improperly shared.

The party said it had told Centurion Project not to use the data but did not say if the list had come from within the party. “We were proactive on that before the injunction today, and we’ll be fully complying with Elections Alberta,” leader Cam Davies told the Canadian Press.

The provincial government has blamed the elections agency for failing to investigate the breach when first notified. But EA says the provincial government weakened its investigative powers last year.

Elections Alberta says nearly 600 people accessed the voter list which it described as “incredibly confidential”, adding in a statement that it understood Albertans were “unhappy, scared and anxious” about the situation.

“We have heard countless stories about the risks people face having their information made public, including stories from domestic violence survivors, law enforcement, marginalized communities, and more,” the group said, calling on the government to amend existing laws to prevent a similar breach in the future.

Parker has denied that he used the Republican Party voter list and suggested the database was compiled from a third party.

“We have taken action to shut down the app until we can ensure that the dataset is compliant with Alberta and Federal privacy laws. The Centurion Project plans to fully comply with Elections Alberta’s investigation,” Parker said in a statement.

In the statement, Parker said volunteers with the Centurion Project “did not have access to phone numbers or emails” and the dataset was from a third party.

But during an online demonstration of the database for volunteers at an April 16 event , Parker showed how the personal information of any voter could be found on the database. One witness at the event – a member of the opposition NDP – was shocked when Parker pulled up the home address and phone number of Alberta’s former premier Jason Kenney. That witness then filed a report with the police.

Kenney has said he is hiring a lawyer for advice, warning that the breach may affect domestic violence survivors, journalists, activists, judges, and other public servants for years to come.

“This has been a real wake up call to the risks that we’re playing with here. We have to assume that all of our personal information and address are potentially available to bad actors,” said Gerson. “People are very angry and they’re very scared. But if you don’t want these guys in your house, why are you even thinking about letting them run your country?”

The leak has become a political flashpoint in Alberta, but the efforts to subvert election and privacy laws expose the immense value in voter lists and mirror a similar battle unfolding in the US.

In recent months, the US department of justice has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for failing to turn over full copies of their voter registration lists. States, including some controlled by Republicans, have pushed back, citing constitutionally guaranteed authority over election administration and worries over data security and privacy laws. Voting rights groups have sued the Trump administration over the requests for voter rolls, accusing it of laying the groundwork for voter purges ahead of the November midterms.

“Data is a major force in modern politics, especially in the ways it can be leveraged. Powerful actors and authoritarian regimes are very creative and have real designs on taking apart the last remaining liberal democracy in North America,” said Patrick Lennox, former manager of criminal intelligence for the RCMP’s federal policing programs in Alberta. “Since Trump came back into power, he has destabilized that democracy to the point where I don’t think you can legitimately call it a democracy any more … And I worry that’s exactly what the play is in Alberta.”

The Centurion Project has not said which company developed the underlying software it relies on, but sources familiar with the investigation say the company is based in the United States. When asked for comment by the Guardian, the company did not respond.

Lennox warned that if the file was stored without proper protections, it could be captured by American data brokers who are governed by less stringent privacy laws than in Canada. The breach also comes as the Trump administration has threatened to subjugate Canada and signalled its support for Alberta’s separatists.

“It’s not like the Americans will put put in digital sovereignty precautions for the voter list,” he said. “Because it’s important to remember: the United States is also trying to break our country.”

Washington is not the only outside actor paying close attention to Alberta’s secession movement. Researchers recently warned that the province is being targeted by covert influence campaigns run by countries such as Russia and China. The Global Centre for Democratic Resilience, the University of Regina and DisinfoWatch recently documented the scope of foreign interference campaigns alongside the proliferation of AI-generated videos and the threat over threats and interference from Donald Trump and his allies.

Brian McQuinn, co-director of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Data, and Conflict at the University of Regina pointed out that before Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, researchers documented a spike in discussions about sovereignty in the country.

“There was this narrative that it was not actually its own sovereign country, that it’s just this sort of mistake of history. This is the exact same language the Americans are using around Canada,” he said.

Covert meetings between separatist activists in the Canadian province of Alberta and members of Donald Trump’s administration have already roiled the province.

“The Americans would like us to be as weak as possible – and a separation movement that harms us in negotiations is obviously really important,” said McQuinn. “They are advancing their own interests around this, when it comes to trade, when it just comes to weakening us in any way they can.”